It is a national imperative to ensure that all students graduate from high school ready for college. There is a large achievement gap to close and our nation needs to raise the standard of education for all students in order to remain competitive. While there are a range of challenges to achieve these goals, there is great momentum for change emerging from the federal government, the efforts of many states, districts and education innovators as well as philanthropists.
Some groups aim to ensure that 80% of high school students graduate from high school ready for college, with a focus on supporting low-income and minority young people in reaching this target. A key component of this strategy is ensuring the availability of rich, reliable data with which to make sound policy and practice decisions at all levels from the schoolhouse to the state house that have a high impact on students' achievements and outcomes. This data provides both outcome data on the performance of the K-12 education system and a powerful data set for evaluation of programs. Further, the most likely way to measure the success of a college ready strategy will be to assess the postsecondary performance and outcomes of students.
Some of the unique questions that need to be answered are as follows:
What percentage of our high school graduates attend college the fall following their graduation or within two years of graduation?
What percentage of our student body remains enrolled from year to year and what percentage obtains a degree?
How do answers to these questions differ across districts, high schools and key student subgroups? How do answers to these questions differ for various types of postsecondary institutions (e.g., public/private, 2-yr/4-yr, selective/non-selective)?
What is the relationship between K-12 events (e.g., high school courses completed, state achievement test scores) and postsecondary outcomes?
What postsecondary outcomes are associated with our specific K-12 programs—especially programs designed to increase college readiness and attendance?
Finding answers to these questions present numerous unique and challenging problems. The amount of data that must be recorded and maintained is a challenge in itself, even in this digital age. However, current database technology allows for management of large amounts of data, if the data is properly organized and given proper identifiers for indexing. Proper indexing allows for searches to be performed efficiently and with high reliability. With the data amassed and proper indexing, some of the above questions could be answered and solutions found for some of our educational problems.
Currently, records of the majority of college students in the nation are stored and kept by the National Student Clearinghouse. This organization provides a service necessary for many governmental functions, such as college loan services by maintaining a database of updated information from colleges and universities reflecting their current enrollment. This database currently holds numerous records reflecting college enrollment data from 1993. High school districts around the country have information on their students, including how they have scored on standardized tests, their ethnicities and other factors that could affect education.
The ability to match the records from high schools to college enrollment records can be difficult because of the differences that occur between secondary and postsecondary records. These problems may range from simple clerical errors, to a student changing his name, to what form of a student's name is recorded. For example, a student's name on a secondary record may be Jimmy Johnson, but his name is recorded as James Johnson or Jim Johnsen in a postsecondary record. Under these circumstances, matching the secondary record with the postsecondary record may be difficult and may not occur even though a student has a record in both databases. This could lead to the false conclusion that Jimmy did not go to college.
To help to prevent non-matches from occurring, a user will often want to use a student's SSN as an identifier to obtain matches. However, under current privacy laws, such as FERPA, a researcher may not be allowed to use a SSN to match records for research purposes. Thus, agencies and researchers may be forced to search using names and DOB resulting in less accurate results.
Thus, what is needed is a system that allows for increased reliability and efficiency in matching postsecondary databases to provide matches with secondary student information while conforming to laws protecting student information.